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I did just think of another drawback for TCP vs UDP punching that I think puts a major point in UDP's favour. It may have been touched on others already. But TCP would require the router to record connection state. This is bad because the table for routers is very small and some of these punching techniques are quite aggressive. Like the algorithm that tries to bypass symmetric NATs. If you're opening hundreds of TCP connections its possible you might even DoS the router. For UDP its plausible optimizations for state management would make it less likely that your punching would render the whole router inoperable. This is only speculation though.





> If you're opening hundreds of TCP connections its possible you might even DoS the router.

This was sometimes an issue for underpowered home/SOHO routers in the mid-2000s, but most modern routers have enough memory to support decently sized connection-tracking tables.

In any case, both TCP and UDP require connection tracking; there's no inherent advantage to UDP.




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